London-based world film sales and production company Taskovski Films has picked up Karol Palka’s feature-length documentary “Bucolic,” which plays in the Critics’ Week section of the Locarno Film Festival.
The Polish film is described as “a parable about people living in a different way, an affectionate observation that invites curiosity about their world and a desire for a closer look.”
It centers on Danusia and her daughter Basia, who “live far away from the modern world, in tune with the rhythm and laws of nature, among animals and the spirits of the dead,” according to a statement. “Their enclave brings peace and a sense of security, but also builds within them a longing for contact with other people.”
Palka’s debut short “Years Have Gone, Winter Is Coming” was shown at the Krakow Film Festival and Warsaw Film Festival, as well as at MiradasDoc in Spain. He was also...
The Polish film is described as “a parable about people living in a different way, an affectionate observation that invites curiosity about their world and a desire for a closer look.”
It centers on Danusia and her daughter Basia, who “live far away from the modern world, in tune with the rhythm and laws of nature, among animals and the spirits of the dead,” according to a statement. “Their enclave brings peace and a sense of security, but also builds within them a longing for contact with other people.”
Palka’s debut short “Years Have Gone, Winter Is Coming” was shown at the Krakow Film Festival and Warsaw Film Festival, as well as at MiradasDoc in Spain. He was also...
- 8/3/2021
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
The training programme will welcome European directors and their teams who are developing upcoming projects and are aiming to refine their visual tone by shooting two scenes. The Ekran+ European professional training programme is awaiting its next batch of participants. Focusing on the creative pre-production process and based around providing shooting practice, the programme aims to help the participants identify and refine the right tone and visual language for their future films. The deadline for the call is less than a month away, on 12 April, and participation is free of charge. The application form can be found here. Ekran+ is intended to become a testing ground for film ideas, enabling them to be translated from paper to screen. As film director Wojciech Marczewski, head of Ekran+, underlines: “Ekran+ was born of the deep belief that the film director is the creator – the person possessing the core creativity.” As...
The Gdynia Film Festival, Poland’s leading event for local movies, has signed the gender-parity pledge, following in the footsteps of Cannes, Locarno, Venice and Toronto.
The pledge was signed Friday by Gdynia’s general director, Leszek Kopec, and writer/director Wojciech Marczewski, who is head of the festival’s programming board. The pledge commits the festival to the following objectives: to set out a schedule for the implementation of changes aimed at achieving parity in all decision-making bodies of the festival; to maintain the festival’s transparency policy; to collect statistics on the gender of the directors of all the films submitted for selection; and to present at the festival’s next edition the results of actions taken by the management to achieve gender parity.
The pledge signing took place as the Polish branch of Women in Film, which represents more than 3,000 women working in the local industry, held...
The pledge was signed Friday by Gdynia’s general director, Leszek Kopec, and writer/director Wojciech Marczewski, who is head of the festival’s programming board. The pledge commits the festival to the following objectives: to set out a schedule for the implementation of changes aimed at achieving parity in all decision-making bodies of the festival; to maintain the festival’s transparency policy; to collect statistics on the gender of the directors of all the films submitted for selection; and to present at the festival’s next edition the results of actions taken by the management to achieve gender parity.
The pledge signing took place as the Polish branch of Women in Film, which represents more than 3,000 women working in the local industry, held...
- 9/22/2018
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
We pay tribute to the film stars and directors from around the world who sadly passed away in 2016.Hector BabencoArgentine-born Brazilian director Hector Babenco died on July 13 at 70-years-old.He found international success with Brazilian slum drama Pixote (1981), going on to make Kiss Of
We pay tribute to the film stars and directors from around the world who sadly passed away in 2016.
Hector Babenco
Argentine-born Brazilian director Hector Babenco died on July 13 at 70-years-old.
He found international success with Brazilian slum drama Pixote (1981), going on to make Kiss Of The Spider Woman (1985), for which he earned a best director Oscar nominee and William Hurt earned an Oscar win for best actor.
Babenco went on to direct Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in Ironweed (1987) and Tom Berenger and John Lithgow in At Play In The Fields Of The Lord (1991).
After undergoing cancer treatment in the 1990s, he returned to the director’s chair for films including Brazilian prison...
We pay tribute to the film stars and directors from around the world who sadly passed away in 2016.
Hector Babenco
Argentine-born Brazilian director Hector Babenco died on July 13 at 70-years-old.
He found international success with Brazilian slum drama Pixote (1981), going on to make Kiss Of The Spider Woman (1985), for which he earned a best director Oscar nominee and William Hurt earned an Oscar win for best actor.
Babenco went on to direct Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in Ironweed (1987) and Tom Berenger and John Lithgow in At Play In The Fields Of The Lord (1991).
After undergoing cancer treatment in the 1990s, he returned to the director’s chair for films including Brazilian prison...
- 12/31/2016
- ScreenDaily
Revered director of Katyn and The Promised Land passed away on Sunday.
Polish cinema - and the international film community at large – are mourning the passing yesterday (Oct 9) of the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda.
His career spanned more than 60 years and included such classics as Ashes And Diamonds, Innocent Sorcerers, The Wedding, Man Of Marble, and Man Of Iron. Four of his features were Oscar-nominated, and he received an honorary Academy Award in 2000.
Wajda had been a resistance fighter during the Second World War and a Fine Art student in Krakow before studying film directing at the Lodz Film School, his debut feature A Generation in 1954 being the first part of a trilogy completed by Canal (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958).
The films introduced Wajda to an international audience.
In the early 1970s, he formed his own film unit, Film Studio ‘X’, where he worked with a group of young film-makers such as Ryszard Bugajski and Agnieska Holland, using...
Polish cinema - and the international film community at large – are mourning the passing yesterday (Oct 9) of the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda.
His career spanned more than 60 years and included such classics as Ashes And Diamonds, Innocent Sorcerers, The Wedding, Man Of Marble, and Man Of Iron. Four of his features were Oscar-nominated, and he received an honorary Academy Award in 2000.
Wajda had been a resistance fighter during the Second World War and a Fine Art student in Krakow before studying film directing at the Lodz Film School, his debut feature A Generation in 1954 being the first part of a trilogy completed by Canal (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958).
The films introduced Wajda to an international audience.
In the early 1970s, he formed his own film unit, Film Studio ‘X’, where he worked with a group of young film-makers such as Ryszard Bugajski and Agnieska Holland, using...
- 10/10/2016
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
“We used to go to the movies. Now we want the movies to come to us, on our televisions, tablets and phones, as streams running into an increasingly unnavigable ocean of media. The dispersal of movie watching across technologies and contexts follows the multiplexing of movie theaters, itself a fragmenting of the single screen theater where movie love was first concentrated and consecrated. (But even in the “good old days,” movies were often only part of an evening’s entertainment that came complete with vaudeville acts and bank nights). For all this, moviegoing still means what it always meant, joining a community, forming an audience and participating in a collective dream.” –
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
From the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming notes for its current series, “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing”
Currently under way at the Billy Wilder Theater inside the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood, the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s far-reaching and fascinating series “Marquee Movies: Movies on Moviegoing” takes sharp aim at an overview of how the movies themselves have portrayed the act of going out to see movies during these years of seismic change in the way we see them. What’s best about the collection of films curated for the series is its scope, which sweeps along from the anything-goes exhibition of the silent era, on through an examination of the opulent era of grandiose movie palaces and post-war audience predilection for exploitation pictures, and straight into an era—ours—of a certain nostalgia for the ways we used to exclusively gather in dark places to watch visions jump out at us from the big screen. (That nostalgia, as it turns out, is often colored by a rear-view perspective on the times which contextualizes it and sometimes gives it a bitter tinge.) As the program notes for the Marquee Movies series puts it, whether you’re an American moviegoer or one from France, Italy, Argentina or Taiwan, “the current sense of loss at the passing of an exhibition era takes its place in the ongoing history of cultural and industrial transformation reflected in these films.”
The series took its inaugural bow last Friday night with a rare 35mm screening of Matinee (1993), director Joe Dante and screenwriter Charlie Haas’s vividly imagined tribute to movie love during a time in Us history which lazy writers frequently like to describe as “the point when America lost its innocence” or some other such silliness. For Americans, and for a whole lot of other people the world over, those days in 1962 during what would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis felt more like days when something a whole lot more tangible than “innocence” was about to be lost, what with the Us and Russia being on the brink of nuclear confrontation and all. The movie lays down this undercurrent of fear and uncertainty as the foundation which tints its main action, that of the arrival of exploitation movie impresario Laurence Woolsey (John Goodman, channeling producer and gimmick maestro William Castle) to Key West, Florida, to promote his latest shock show, Mant!, on the very weekend that American troops set to sea, ready to fire on Russian missile installments a mere 90 miles away in Cuba.
Woolsey’s hardly worried that his potential audience will be distracted the specter of annihilation; in fact, he’s energized by it, convinced that the free-floating anxiety will translate into box office dollars contributed by nervous kids and adults looking for a safe and scary good time, a disposal cinematic depository for all their worst fears. And it certainly doesn’t matter that Woolsey’s movie is a corny sci-fi absurdity-- all the better for his particular brand of enhancements. Mant!, a lovingly sculpted mash-up of 1950s hits like The Fly and Them!, benefits from “Atomo-vision,” which incorporates variants of Castle innovations like Emergo and Percepto, as well as “Rumble-rama,” a very crude precursor to Universal’s Oscar-winning Sensurround system. The movie’s Saturday afternoon screening is where Dante and Haas really let loose their tickled and twisted imaginations, with the help of Woolsey’s theatrical enhancements.
Leading up to the fearful and farcical unleashing of Mant!, Dante stages a beautifully understated sequence that moved me to tears when I saw it with my daughters last Friday night at the Billy Wilder Theater. Matinee is seen primarily through the eyes of young Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton), a military kid whose dad is among those waiting it out on nuclear-armed boats pointed in the direction of Cuba. Gene is a monster-movie nerd (and a clear stand-in for Dante, Haas and just about anybody—like me—whose primary biblical text was provided not by that fella in the burning bush but instead by Forrest J. Ackerman within the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland), and he manages to worm his way into Woolsey’s good graces as the producer prepares the local theater to show his picture. At one point he walks down the street in the company of the larger-than-life producer, who starts talking about his inspirations and why he makes the sort of movies he does:
“A zillion years ago, a guy’s living in a cave,” Woolsey expounds. “He goes out one day—Bam! He gets chased by a mammoth. Now, he’s scared to death, but he gets away. And when it’s all over with, he feels great.”
Gene, eager to believe but also to understand, responds quizzically-- “Well, yeah, ‘cause he’s still living.”
“Yeah, but he knows he is, and he feels it,” Woolsey counters. “So he goes home, back to the cave. First thing he does, he does a drawing of a mammoth.” (At this point the brick wall which the two of them are passing becomes a blank screen onto which Woolsey conjures an animated behemoth that entrances Gene and us.) Woolsey continues:
“He thinks, ‘People are coming to see this. Let’s make it good. Let’s make the teeth real long and the eyes real mean.’ Boom! The first monster movie. That’s probably why I still do it. You make the teeth as big as you want, then you kill it off, everything’s okay, the lights come up,” Woolsey concludes, ending his illustrative fantasy with a sigh.
But that’s not all, folks. At this point, Dante cuts to a Steadicam shot as it moves into the lobby hall of that Key West theater, past posters of Hatari!, Lonely are the Brave, Six Black Horses and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The tracking shot continues up the stairs, letting us get a really close look at the worn, perhaps pungent carpet, most likely the same rug that was laid down when the theater opened 30 or so years earlier, into the snack bar area, then glides over to the closed swinging doors leading into the auditorium, while Woolsey continues:
“You see, the people come into your cave with the 200-year-old carpet, the guy tears your ticket in half—it’s too late to turn back now. The water fountain’s all booby-trapped and ready, the stuff laid out on the candy counter. Then you come over here to where it’s dark-- there could be anything in there—and you say, ‘Here I am. What have you got for me?’”
Forget nostalgia for a style of moviegoing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compact, evocative and heartfelt tribute to the space in which we used to see movies than those couple of minutes in Matinee. The shot and the narration work so vividly together that I swear I could whiff the must underlying that carpet, papered over lovingly with the smell of popcorn wafting through the confined space of that tiny snack bar, just as if I was a kid again myself, wandering into the friendly confines of the Alger Theater in Lakeview, Oregon (More on that place next week.)
Dante’s movie is a romp, no doubt, but its nostalgia is a heartier variety than what we usually get, and it leaves us with an undercurrent of uneasiness that is unusual for a genre most enough content to look back through amber. Woolsey’s words resonate for every youngster who has searched for reasons to explain their attraction to the scary side of cinema and memories of the places where those images were first encountered, but in Matinee there’s another terror with which to contend, one not so easily held at bay.
Of course the real world monster of the movie— the bomb— was also, during that weekend in 1962 and in Matinee’s representation of the missile crisis, “killed off,” making “everything okay.” But Dante makes us understand that while calm has been momentarily restored, something deeper has been forever disturbed. The movie acknowledges the societal disarray which was already under way in Vietnam, and the American South, and only months away from spilling out from Dallas and onto the greater American landscape in a way so much less containable than even the radiative effects of a single cataclysmic event. That awareness leaves Matinee with a sorrowful aftertaste that is hard to shake. The movie’s last image, of our two main characters gathered on the beach, greeting helicopters that are flying home from having hovered at the precipice of nuclear destruction, is one of relief for familial unity restored—Gene is, after all, getting his dad back. But it’s also one of foreboding. Dante leaves us with an extreme close-up of a copter looming into frame, absent even the context of the sky, bearing down on us like a real-life mutant creature, an eerie bellwether of political and societal chaos yet to come as a stout companion to the movie’s general air of celebratory remembrance.
***************************************
The “Marquee Movies” series has already seen Matinee (last Friday night), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) paired with Polish director Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 Escape from Liberty Island (last Saturday night), and Ettore Scola’s masterful Splendor (1989), which screened last Sunday night.
But there’s plenty more to come. Sunday, June 12, the archive series unveils a double bill of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933) with the less well-known This Way, Please (1937), a terrific tale of a star-struck movie theater usherette with dreams of singing and dancing just like the stars she idolizes, starring Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Betty Grable, Jim Jordan, Marian Jordan and the brilliantly grizzled Ned Sparks.
Wednesday, June 15, you can see Uruguay’s A Useful Life (2010), in which a movie theater manager in Montevideo faces up the fact that the days of his beloved movie theater are numbered, paired up with Luc Moullet’s droll account of the feud between the French film journals Cahiers du Cinema and Positif, entitled The Seats of the Alcazar (1989).
One of my favorites, Tsai Ming-liang’s haunting Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) gets a rare projection at the Wilder on Sunday, June 19, along with Lisandsro Alonzo’s Fantasma (2006), described by the archive as “a hypnotic commentary on cinematic rituals and presence.”
Friday, June 24, you can see, if you dare, Lamberto Bava’s gory meta-horror film Demons (1985) and then stay for Bigas Luna’s similarly twisted treatise on the movies and voyeurism, 1987’s Anguish.
Saturday afternoon, June 25, “Marquee Movies” presents a rare screening of Gregory La Cava’s hilarious slapstick spoof of rural moviegoing, His Nibs (1921), paired up with what I consider, alongside Matinee and Goodbye, Dragon Inn, one of the real jewels of the series, Basil Dearden’s marvelously funny The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), all about what happens when a newlywed couple inherits a rundown cinema populated by a staff of eccentrics that include Margaret Rutherford and Peter Sellers. (More on that one next week.)
And the series concludes on Sunday, June 26, with a screening of the original 174-minute director’s cut of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988).
(Each program also features a variety of moviegoing-oriented shorts, trailers and other surprises. Click the individual links for details and show times.)
******************************************
(Next week: My review of The Smallest Show on Earth and a remembrance of my own hometown movie theater, which closed in 2015.)
*******************************************
Later this year Matinee will be released by Universal in the U.S. (details to come) and by Arrow Films in the UK (with a nifty assortment of extras).
- 6/11/2016
- by Dennis Cozzalio
- Trailers from Hell
★★★★★ Polish director Wojciech Marczewski was no stranger to his country's censors - giving up film direction altogether after 1981's Shivers due to the return of martial law and film censorship. He exploited his experiences to the full in his fabulous absurdist comedy, Escape from the 'Liberty' Cinema. Those familiar with Woody Allen's 1985 comedy The Purple Rose of Cairo will notice similarities. Marczeweski based his narrative on Allen's and then politicised it, crafting an exceptional satire set just prior to the fall of the communist regime that combines surreal humour and cinematic allusions to champion freedom, artistic or otherwise.
- 1/19/2016
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
After being arrested in May 2014 by the Russian Federal Security Service on suspicion of terrorist plotting and entanglement in a Ukrainian paramilitary group, Oleg Sentsov could be sentenced to 23 more years in prison Tuesday. So in the face of this week's verdict, which would exile the Ukrainian filmmaker to a high-security penal colony, the European Film Academy has gathered over 1,000 signatures calling for his release from Russia, whose accusations remain shadowy after the retraction of a key witness testimony last month. Petitioning supporters (listed here) come from all over Europe, including film academies in Poland, Germany, Austria and Czech Republic, and the Union of Russian Filmmakers—who aren't strangers to censorship. Filmmakers on the list include: Stephen Daldry, Mike Leigh, Mike Downey, Agnieszka Holland, Dariusz Jablonski, Aki Kaurismäki, Ken Loach, Wojciech Marczewski, Béla Tarr, Bertrand Tavernier, Andrzej Wajda and Wim Wenders. Read More:...
- 8/24/2015
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Thompson on Hollywood
(Marek Piwowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Wojciech Marczewski, 1970-1981; Second Run, 15)
This latest collection of key Polish films come from a decade that began with a relaxation of censorship and ended with the brutal clampdown that accompanied the suppression of Solidarity, the independent, non-governmental trade union, in a Gdańsk shipyard and the introduction of martial law in 1981. Each is accompanied by a booklet to put them in their historical context, and all three attack from different angles the communist regime in a period represented by what came to be called “the cinema of moral anxiety”.
Now widely regarded as Poland’s first cult movie, Marek Piwowski’s The Cruise (1970) is a broad satire on the absurdity of the whole communist system. It’s set on a pleasure steamer chugging down the Vistula and is clearly inspired by Gogol’s 1836 comedy The Government Inspector. In the play the mayor of a provincial town...
This latest collection of key Polish films come from a decade that began with a relaxation of censorship and ended with the brutal clampdown that accompanied the suppression of Solidarity, the independent, non-governmental trade union, in a Gdańsk shipyard and the introduction of martial law in 1981. Each is accompanied by a booklet to put them in their historical context, and all three attack from different angles the communist regime in a period represented by what came to be called “the cinema of moral anxiety”.
Now widely regarded as Poland’s first cult movie, Marek Piwowski’s The Cruise (1970) is a broad satire on the absurdity of the whole communist system. It’s set on a pleasure steamer chugging down the Vistula and is clearly inspired by Gogol’s 1836 comedy The Government Inspector. In the play the mayor of a provincial town...
- 7/5/2015
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
★★★★☆ "Polish films are... boring..." claims Engineer Mamon in Marek Piwowski's The Cruise (1970), widely considered the country's original 'cult' film. A tongue-in-cheek microcosm of the Communist state in which it was produced, it sits perfectly within the third volume of Second Run's excellent Polish Cinema Classics series alongside Krzysztof Zanussi's Camouflage (1977) and Wojciech Marczewski's Shivers (1981). Both of the latter filmmakers were featured in Volume 2 of the series and whilst neither film here quite matches the defining masterworks produced previously, this is another impressive triptych that proves Mamon wrong and showcases three distinct approaches to challenging the social order.
- 5/26/2015
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
In a letter to Russian authorities, European film-makers have expressed their worry about the fate of Ukrainian film-maker Oleg Sentsov
The Board of the European Film Academy has initiated a letter to Russian authorities about Oleg Sentsov.
Sentsov was arrested last month [see separate story here] and European film-makers have signed the letter to express their worry about the fate of the Ukrainian film-maker.
The letter states that “we are deeply worried and cannot stop wondering how he is and what his future will be,” and goes on to call upon the Russian authorities to ensure the safety of Sentsov and to make public his whereabouts.
Pedro Almodóvar, Ken Loach, Béla Tarr and Wim Wenders are among the film-makers to have signed the letter.
The letter in full
To
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin - President of Russia
Sergey Evgenyevich Naryshkin – Chairman of the State Duma of the Russian Federation
Alexander Wassiljewitsch Bortnikow - Director of the Fsb
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kolokoltsev - Russian...
The Board of the European Film Academy has initiated a letter to Russian authorities about Oleg Sentsov.
Sentsov was arrested last month [see separate story here] and European film-makers have signed the letter to express their worry about the fate of the Ukrainian film-maker.
The letter states that “we are deeply worried and cannot stop wondering how he is and what his future will be,” and goes on to call upon the Russian authorities to ensure the safety of Sentsov and to make public his whereabouts.
Pedro Almodóvar, Ken Loach, Béla Tarr and Wim Wenders are among the film-makers to have signed the letter.
The letter in full
To
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin - President of Russia
Sergey Evgenyevich Naryshkin – Chairman of the State Duma of the Russian Federation
Alexander Wassiljewitsch Bortnikow - Director of the Fsb
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kolokoltsev - Russian...
- 6/10/2014
- by ian.sandwell@screendaily.com (Ian Sandwell)
- ScreenDaily
(1972-90, Second Run, U)
This excellent box set contains a first-rate film from each of the three postwar generations of Polish directors. All are accompanied by a revealing interview. The great Andrzej Wajda (b1926), still best known for his second world war trilogy, is represented by his three-hour 1974 version of Nobel laureate Wladyslaw Reymont's 1898 novel The Promised Land. Magnificently staged and never previously released in Britain, it centres on three friends (a Pole, a German and a Jew) being corrupted by the unrestrained capitalism of late-19th-century Poland when they sacrifice principles and common humanity while establishing themselves as textile tycoons.
The second film, Illumination (1972), directed by the most cerebral Polish director, Krzysztof Zanussi (b1939), is a dazzling, cinematic Bildungsroman about a gifted young physicist, his intellectual and spiritual development, his marriage, fatherhood and intimations of mortality. It's relentlessly serious, unlike the extremely funny political comedy Escape from the "Liberty...
This excellent box set contains a first-rate film from each of the three postwar generations of Polish directors. All are accompanied by a revealing interview. The great Andrzej Wajda (b1926), still best known for his second world war trilogy, is represented by his three-hour 1974 version of Nobel laureate Wladyslaw Reymont's 1898 novel The Promised Land. Magnificently staged and never previously released in Britain, it centres on three friends (a Pole, a German and a Jew) being corrupted by the unrestrained capitalism of late-19th-century Poland when they sacrifice principles and common humanity while establishing themselves as textile tycoons.
The second film, Illumination (1972), directed by the most cerebral Polish director, Krzysztof Zanussi (b1939), is a dazzling, cinematic Bildungsroman about a gifted young physicist, his intellectual and spiritual development, his marriage, fatherhood and intimations of mortality. It's relentlessly serious, unlike the extremely funny political comedy Escape from the "Liberty...
- 3/31/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
★★★★★ March saw the 11th Kinoteka Polish Film Festival take place across the UK - highlight being was a trio of rereleased masterpieces. Those films have now been pulled together for Second Run's Polish Cinema Classics Volume II. The collection consists of Andrzej Wajda's The Promised Land (Ziemia obiecana, 1975), Wojciech Marczewski's Escape from the 'Liberty' Cinema (Ucieczka z kina 'Wolnosc', 1990) and Krzysztof Zanussi's Illumination (Iluminacja, 1973). All affecting in their own way, these three films are essentially linked by their inventiveness and vibrancy, which shines through in different aspects of each entry.
Read more »...
Read more »...
- 3/26/2013
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
"Weiser" is about a mystery, but it's a far cry from the way Hollywood does things. In a studio film, a mystery begins with a dead body and ends with a solution. In "Weiser", from Polish writer-director Wojciech Marczewski, there never is a body -- or at least none that anyone ever finds -- and it ends with an enigma. "Weiser" wants to play the old what-is-truth game: The movie deals with the tricks memory can play and the ultimate impossibility of divining what is and is not true.
Such games can intrigue movie audiences, but they also can frustrate. "Weiser" is likely to do both in about equal measure. Many might thrill to the realization that what really happened in an incident more than 30 years old will remain illusive, no matter how many times it is replayed in the mind or how much one investigates the memories of others. To others, such story maneuvers ring hollow. In any event, the mystery of "Weiser" is not likely to spread beyond film festivals and European art houses.
"Weiser" is told in fragments in two time planes set 33 years apart. In the earlier period -- 1967, according to media notes but not well-established in the film -- a group of 12-year-olds in a small Silesian town fall under the thrall of a strange playmate, Dawid Weiser (Andrzej Basiukiewicz).
He seduces them into playing games with death -- walking on railroad tracks before an oncoming train and lying down on an airstrip just as a plane is about to land. From an old munitions factory, he produces explosives, which he detonates on aging, unused structures. Then, during one mistimed explosion, he disappears without a trace.
In the other time frame, in present day, one of the survivors, Pawel (Marek Kondrat), remains haunted by the incident. Returning to his native town with a German girlfriend (Juliane Kohler) after many years in Germany, he revisits the others to test their memories of the episode. When one dies on the anniversary of the detonation -- a man claiming to have seen Dawid recently -- Pawel begins to think his childhood chum was perhaps a magician. After all, didn't they once all see him levitate?
These twin story lines are intercut with the interrogation of the youngsters by school and government authorities following the explosion. In the immediate aftermath of the event, the children seek to hide what knowledge they do have.
Pawel has not much better luck in present day. Memories are faulty or at odds with his own. One man doesn't even want to discuss the incident.
The movie hints at bigger issues. The fact that Dawid is Jewish and that the munitions factory presumably is left over from World War II is no doubt significant. And what of all those poisoned fish in the local river? But the movie leaves all interpretations to the viewer.
However, when the viewer is reading inadequate subtitles and not always familiar with the Polish cultural and historical references, this can add to the mystery in ways the filmmaker never intended.
The film is intelligently designed with the fragments interlocking neatly so as to keep tensions building. Cinematographer Krzysztof Ptak films the past in bright, summery colors, while the present is shrouded in a wintry blue-gray.
Kondrat is clearly playing a man in crisis. But it is not clear what has triggered all these bad memories. For Marczewski, any search for meaning or truth is an end in itself. Philosophically, he might be right. But in cinema, this can lead to unsatisfying storytelling.
WEISER
Tor Film Production, Vega Film AG, Provobis Film
Producer: Krzystof Zanussi
Director: Wojciech Marczewski
Screenwriters: Wojciech Marczewski, Maciej Strzembosz
Based on the novel by: Pawel Huelle
Director of photography: Krzysztof Ptak
Production designer: Andrzej Kowalczyk
Music: Zbigniew Preisner
Costume designer: Mag dalena Biedrzycka
Editor: Milenia Fiedler
Color/stereo
Cast:
Pawel: Marek Kondrat
Elka: Krystyna Janda
Juliane: Juliane Kohler
Dawid: Andrzej Basiukiewicz
Pawel as a Child: Maciej Jaszczuk
Elka as a Child: Olga Frycz
Running time -- 100 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Such games can intrigue movie audiences, but they also can frustrate. "Weiser" is likely to do both in about equal measure. Many might thrill to the realization that what really happened in an incident more than 30 years old will remain illusive, no matter how many times it is replayed in the mind or how much one investigates the memories of others. To others, such story maneuvers ring hollow. In any event, the mystery of "Weiser" is not likely to spread beyond film festivals and European art houses.
"Weiser" is told in fragments in two time planes set 33 years apart. In the earlier period -- 1967, according to media notes but not well-established in the film -- a group of 12-year-olds in a small Silesian town fall under the thrall of a strange playmate, Dawid Weiser (Andrzej Basiukiewicz).
He seduces them into playing games with death -- walking on railroad tracks before an oncoming train and lying down on an airstrip just as a plane is about to land. From an old munitions factory, he produces explosives, which he detonates on aging, unused structures. Then, during one mistimed explosion, he disappears without a trace.
In the other time frame, in present day, one of the survivors, Pawel (Marek Kondrat), remains haunted by the incident. Returning to his native town with a German girlfriend (Juliane Kohler) after many years in Germany, he revisits the others to test their memories of the episode. When one dies on the anniversary of the detonation -- a man claiming to have seen Dawid recently -- Pawel begins to think his childhood chum was perhaps a magician. After all, didn't they once all see him levitate?
These twin story lines are intercut with the interrogation of the youngsters by school and government authorities following the explosion. In the immediate aftermath of the event, the children seek to hide what knowledge they do have.
Pawel has not much better luck in present day. Memories are faulty or at odds with his own. One man doesn't even want to discuss the incident.
The movie hints at bigger issues. The fact that Dawid is Jewish and that the munitions factory presumably is left over from World War II is no doubt significant. And what of all those poisoned fish in the local river? But the movie leaves all interpretations to the viewer.
However, when the viewer is reading inadequate subtitles and not always familiar with the Polish cultural and historical references, this can add to the mystery in ways the filmmaker never intended.
The film is intelligently designed with the fragments interlocking neatly so as to keep tensions building. Cinematographer Krzysztof Ptak films the past in bright, summery colors, while the present is shrouded in a wintry blue-gray.
Kondrat is clearly playing a man in crisis. But it is not clear what has triggered all these bad memories. For Marczewski, any search for meaning or truth is an end in itself. Philosophically, he might be right. But in cinema, this can lead to unsatisfying storytelling.
WEISER
Tor Film Production, Vega Film AG, Provobis Film
Producer: Krzystof Zanussi
Director: Wojciech Marczewski
Screenwriters: Wojciech Marczewski, Maciej Strzembosz
Based on the novel by: Pawel Huelle
Director of photography: Krzysztof Ptak
Production designer: Andrzej Kowalczyk
Music: Zbigniew Preisner
Costume designer: Mag dalena Biedrzycka
Editor: Milenia Fiedler
Color/stereo
Cast:
Pawel: Marek Kondrat
Elka: Krystyna Janda
Juliane: Juliane Kohler
Dawid: Andrzej Basiukiewicz
Pawel as a Child: Maciej Jaszczuk
Elka as a Child: Olga Frycz
Running time -- 100 minutes
No MPAA rating...
"Weiser" is about a mystery, but it's a far cry from the way Hollywood does things. In a studio film, a mystery begins with a dead body and ends with a solution. In "Weiser", from Polish writer-director Wojciech Marczewski, there never is a body -- or at least none that anyone ever finds -- and it ends with an enigma. "Weiser" wants to play the old what-is-truth game: The movie deals with the tricks memory can play and the ultimate impossibility of divining what is and is not true.
Such games can intrigue movie audiences, but they also can frustrate. "Weiser" is likely to do both in about equal measure. Many might thrill to the realization that what really happened in an incident more than 30 years old will remain illusive, no matter how many times it is replayed in the mind or how much one investigates the memories of others. To others, such story maneuvers ring hollow. In any event, the mystery of "Weiser" is not likely to spread beyond film festivals and European art houses.
"Weiser" is told in fragments in two time planes set 33 years apart. In the earlier period -- 1967, according to media notes but not well-established in the film -- a group of 12-year-olds in a small Silesian town fall under the thrall of a strange playmate, Dawid Weiser (Andrzej Basiukiewicz).
He seduces them into playing games with death -- walking on railroad tracks before an oncoming train and lying down on an airstrip just as a plane is about to land. From an old munitions factory, he produces explosives, which he detonates on aging, unused structures. Then, during one mistimed explosion, he disappears without a trace.
In the other time frame, in present day, one of the survivors, Pawel (Marek Kondrat), remains haunted by the incident. Returning to his native town with a German girlfriend (Juliane Kohler) after many years in Germany, he revisits the others to test their memories of the episode. When one dies on the anniversary of the detonation -- a man claiming to have seen Dawid recently -- Pawel begins to think his childhood chum was perhaps a magician. After all, didn't they once all see him levitate?
These twin story lines are intercut with the interrogation of the youngsters by school and government authorities following the explosion. In the immediate aftermath of the event, the children seek to hide what knowledge they do have.
Pawel has not much better luck in present day. Memories are faulty or at odds with his own. One man doesn't even want to discuss the incident.
The movie hints at bigger issues. The fact that Dawid is Jewish and that the munitions factory presumably is left over from World War II is no doubt significant. And what of all those poisoned fish in the local river? But the movie leaves all interpretations to the viewer.
However, when the viewer is reading inadequate subtitles and not always familiar with the Polish cultural and historical references, this can add to the mystery in ways the filmmaker never intended.
The film is intelligently designed with the fragments interlocking neatly so as to keep tensions building. Cinematographer Krzysztof Ptak films the past in bright, summery colors, while the present is shrouded in a wintry blue-gray.
Kondrat is clearly playing a man in crisis. But it is not clear what has triggered all these bad memories. For Marczewski, any search for meaning or truth is an end in itself. Philosophically, he might be right. But in cinema, this can lead to unsatisfying storytelling.
WEISER
Tor Film Production, Vega Film AG, Provobis Film
Producer: Krzystof Zanussi
Director: Wojciech Marczewski
Screenwriters: Wojciech Marczewski, Maciej Strzembosz
Based on the novel by: Pawel Huelle
Director of photography: Krzysztof Ptak
Production designer: Andrzej Kowalczyk
Music: Zbigniew Preisner
Costume designer: Mag dalena Biedrzycka
Editor: Milenia Fiedler
Color/stereo
Cast:
Pawel: Marek Kondrat
Elka: Krystyna Janda
Juliane: Juliane Kohler
Dawid: Andrzej Basiukiewicz
Pawel as a Child: Maciej Jaszczuk
Elka as a Child: Olga Frycz
Running time -- 100 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Such games can intrigue movie audiences, but they also can frustrate. "Weiser" is likely to do both in about equal measure. Many might thrill to the realization that what really happened in an incident more than 30 years old will remain illusive, no matter how many times it is replayed in the mind or how much one investigates the memories of others. To others, such story maneuvers ring hollow. In any event, the mystery of "Weiser" is not likely to spread beyond film festivals and European art houses.
"Weiser" is told in fragments in two time planes set 33 years apart. In the earlier period -- 1967, according to media notes but not well-established in the film -- a group of 12-year-olds in a small Silesian town fall under the thrall of a strange playmate, Dawid Weiser (Andrzej Basiukiewicz).
He seduces them into playing games with death -- walking on railroad tracks before an oncoming train and lying down on an airstrip just as a plane is about to land. From an old munitions factory, he produces explosives, which he detonates on aging, unused structures. Then, during one mistimed explosion, he disappears without a trace.
In the other time frame, in present day, one of the survivors, Pawel (Marek Kondrat), remains haunted by the incident. Returning to his native town with a German girlfriend (Juliane Kohler) after many years in Germany, he revisits the others to test their memories of the episode. When one dies on the anniversary of the detonation -- a man claiming to have seen Dawid recently -- Pawel begins to think his childhood chum was perhaps a magician. After all, didn't they once all see him levitate?
These twin story lines are intercut with the interrogation of the youngsters by school and government authorities following the explosion. In the immediate aftermath of the event, the children seek to hide what knowledge they do have.
Pawel has not much better luck in present day. Memories are faulty or at odds with his own. One man doesn't even want to discuss the incident.
The movie hints at bigger issues. The fact that Dawid is Jewish and that the munitions factory presumably is left over from World War II is no doubt significant. And what of all those poisoned fish in the local river? But the movie leaves all interpretations to the viewer.
However, when the viewer is reading inadequate subtitles and not always familiar with the Polish cultural and historical references, this can add to the mystery in ways the filmmaker never intended.
The film is intelligently designed with the fragments interlocking neatly so as to keep tensions building. Cinematographer Krzysztof Ptak films the past in bright, summery colors, while the present is shrouded in a wintry blue-gray.
Kondrat is clearly playing a man in crisis. But it is not clear what has triggered all these bad memories. For Marczewski, any search for meaning or truth is an end in itself. Philosophically, he might be right. But in cinema, this can lead to unsatisfying storytelling.
WEISER
Tor Film Production, Vega Film AG, Provobis Film
Producer: Krzystof Zanussi
Director: Wojciech Marczewski
Screenwriters: Wojciech Marczewski, Maciej Strzembosz
Based on the novel by: Pawel Huelle
Director of photography: Krzysztof Ptak
Production designer: Andrzej Kowalczyk
Music: Zbigniew Preisner
Costume designer: Mag dalena Biedrzycka
Editor: Milenia Fiedler
Color/stereo
Cast:
Pawel: Marek Kondrat
Elka: Krystyna Janda
Juliane: Juliane Kohler
Dawid: Andrzej Basiukiewicz
Pawel as a Child: Maciej Jaszczuk
Elka as a Child: Olga Frycz
Running time -- 100 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 2/15/2001
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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